In the two years since CHOICE Computer's previous survey in 2009, there has been a major shift from ADSL to ADSL2/2+, and the demise of dial-up as the primary means of connection. Just five people of almost 4000 responses cited it as their connection type.

Overall, we’re happier with our ISPs, with many of our measures of user satisfaction showing improvement.

This time around, we polled CHOICE Computer and CHOICE Online subscribers in August 2011, and received 3871 responses.

The survey questions covered satisfaction and other aspects of home internet and related technology and services.

We’ve reported figures on individual ISPs that had more than 30 responses, and aggregated the rest, and examined results that are significantly different from the average or from the previous result.

Last survey, we reported satisfaction in terms of the number of “very satisfied” responses. This time, we’ve added the “fairly satisfied” responses as well – this makes it easier to compare with other surveys, as well as surveys we run on other topics.

To make comparisons, we’ve recalculated the results from 2007 to match, so you’ll notice changes in the figures.

Some of the questions are not directly comparable with previous surveys. We’ve noted where this is the case.

However they connect, respondents are overwhelmingly loyal to their current provider, with 60% still with the same ISP after more than four years, and another 17% for at least three years.

In part, this may reflect the difficulty of changing providers – 66% of users have their internet bundled with another service, presumably for the cost savings it brings, which makes a change more complicated.

Of users who do bundle an internet service with something else, 88% have it bundled with a home phone, and 33% with a mobile.

The biggest shift revealed by the survey is from ADSL to ADSL2/2+, with Telstra falling from 652 ADSL customers responding to our survey last time to just 278.

No doubt many have simply upgraded to a Telstra ADSL2/2+ plan, but there’s been an overall drop in market share across the two categories. At the same time, Internode has more than doubled its ADSL2/2+ share.

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